Fellowships

Our Current Fellows

Internal Fellows

Joel Burges (Spring 2018)

Assistant Professor of English

Joel Burges is the author of essays and reviews that have appeared in New German Critique, Post45, Cinema Journal, and Twentieth Century Literature. The question of time has animated his most recent book projects: a collection of 20 keyword essays, edited with Amy J. Elias, entitled Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (New York University Press, 2016), and a book entitled Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018). His next book, on which he will be working at the University of Rochester Humanities Center in 2018, is entitled Literature after TV. It charts how television, the most significant mass medium of the second half of the twentieth century, changed how novelists and poets wrote, moving from the poems of Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine and the fiction of A. S. Byatt and Tom Carson to mini-series such as The Thorn Birds and War and Remembrance and shows such as MTV's Def Poetry Jam. In examining works such as these, a new genealogy of postwar and contemporary writing emerges at the nexus of media history and literary history. Finding his home in the Department of English, he is also affiliated with Film and Media Studies, Digital Media Studies, the Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities (funded by the Mellon Foundation), and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.

Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge (Fall 2017)

Assistant Professor of Art & Art History

Evelyne uses lens-based media to reflect upon and re-interpret the relationship between people and the ways they occupy space. She digitally deconstructs domestic and institutional spaces and the frames within—doors, windows and walls. Theses spaces become her medium and framing device for site-specific installations. She incorporates trompe l'oeil and camouflage techniques, double-takes and shifting point of views as a method for destabilizing vision and making viewers conscious of vision as an activity in which the whole body is involved. Hovering between the finite border of the real and the fictional, theatrical and mundane, spontaneous and directed, her work is confounding the viewer’s expectations of realism by creating manipulated scenes where narratives are compressed, compromised or suspended.

Alison Peterman (Spring 2018)

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Alison works on natural philosophy and philosophy of cognition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has written about the history of physics and the philosophy of science, including about matter, space and motion, the laws of nature, causation and explanation. In her work, she tries to draw on the history of philosophy as a source of surprising and interesting approaches to questions that philosophers and scientists still think about today.Alison has focused especially on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and Margaret Cavendish, but has also published articles about Leibniz, Descartes, and Newton, and is currently working on projects in early modern philosophy of mind in philosophers like Hume, Reid and Mary Shepherd.

Steven Rozenski (Fall 2017)

Assistant Professor of English

Steven Rozenski studies late medieval literature and devotional culture, focusing particularly on the translation and adaptation of Continental contemplative texts in England both before and after the Reformation (ca. 1300-1600). He has written about medieval concepts of authorship, the role of aurality and music in Dominican mysticism, poetic form and bridal mysticism in Netherlandish beguine writing, as well as the interaction of text and image in illuminated manuscripts. As a translator of medieval German, Steven has published (with Klaus Pietschmann) selections of the verse autobiography of the fifteenth-century German singer and composer Johannes von Soest. Currently, he is working on a book on trans-Reformation English spirituality, an edition of Middle English texts by and about Catherine of Siena, and a translation of Henry Suso's Little Book of Eternal Wisdom.

External Fellows

Dan Blim

Assistant Professor of Music, Denison University

Dan Blim studies various forms of music in the United States, with a particular interest in the cultural and political power of music. His dissertation, "Patchwork Nation: Collage, Music, and American Identity" won the Society for American Music's Housewright Dissertation Award. Dan has published and presented research on such topics as music in recent presidential elections, Bernard Herrman's score to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, mascuilinity and irony in the music of Weezer, depictions of Native Americans in Edward MacDowell's piano music, and American history depicted in recent Broadway musicals. Dan's current project is a book investigating the role of music in memorialization in twenty-first century America through 9/11 commemorative compositions, reissues of historical recordings, and museum soundscapes.

Dan is also a board game enthusiast, folk dance instructor, and a championship-winning punner.

Benjamin Nienass

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Montclair State University

Ben studies theoretical and political efforts to rethink collective memory in postnational constellations, specifically in the contexts of regional integration and migration. His articles have appeared in Social Research,Politics & Society, and The Review of Politics, among other journals. He is the co-editor of Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information (Berghahn Books, 2014, Paperback in 2016), as well as the co-editor of several special journal issues on questions of memory, materiality, and mourning. In an attempt to show how transnational memories are subject to local/national economies and politics of remembrance and forgetting, Ben's current project examines German state and civil society initiatives to publicly commemorate and recognize the Armenian genocide.